venturebeat.com Archives - 09 December 2016, Friday

Mobile game development at a big publisher has as much turnover and volatility as traditional gaming. King, which is now a subsidiary of Activision , has closed down Singapore-based developer Nonstop Games. King acquired the studio in 2014 following the success of the Warcraft-like Fa...

In the financial services industry, blockchain looms as a large but distant and somewhat mysterious presence. A few forward-thinking bankers take it seriously and are trying to figure out how to turn it to their own advantage. Everyone else has heard about it, knows little about it, a...

BitPay , which bills itself as the largest processor of Bitcoin in the world, has linked up with Intel to help ensure the security of its digital wallet. Copay , the open-source Bitcoin wallet created by BitPay, now integrates with the Software Guard Extensions built into Intel’s seve...

Overstock.com has had it with the inefficiency of today’s equity markets, and it’s not going to take it anymore. The company announced a new blockchain-based platform for trading equities (stocks and bonds) called T0 last year. Today, at the Money 20/20 conference in Las Vegas, Overst...

(Reuters) – German carrier Air Berlin on Saturday said it had banned Samsung’s Galaxy Note7 mobile phones from flights, while rival Lufthansa said it had banned the phones on services to and from the United States and expected that soon the ban would apply to all other Lufthansa busin...

The self-lacing sneakers that Michael J. Fox wore in Back to the Future II are now a reality, and Nike has set up a way to win a pair through the crowdfunding platform RallyUp as part of a promotion for the Michael J. Fox Foundation . The self-lacing shoes first appeared in the sci-fi...

(Reuters) – Users of ride-hailing firm Grab will be able to book driverless cars from Friday as it partners with a start-up testing the technology in Singapore, just days after rival Uber debuted its self-driving vehicles in the United States. The move comes as technology companies an...

(Reuters) – It was social media chatter that gave him away. Changing his profile picture on the LINE messaging app to a banner pledging “Indonesian support and solidarity for ISIS” probably didn’t help. Had it not been for all that, Gigih Rahmat Dewa’s plot to launch a rocket attack o...

According to cryptocurrency portal Coinhills’ real-time ranking of global bitcoin exchanges in volume of transactions , Quoine is ranked in 7th place following Chinese six exchanges in a craze of speculation. This list obviously indicates Quoine being Japan’s largest bitcoin exchange ...

Google has finally launched its mobile payments service, Android Pay, in the U.K. The updated app was quietly pushed live yesterday, and Google has now officially confirmed that Android Pay is available for anyone in the U.K. to use, assuming they have a compatible NFC-enabled device....

(Reuters) – As one would-be father of bitcoin falls by the wayside, squabbling among the web-based currency’s lead developers is exposing a fundamental flaw: it must evolve to meet growing demand, but may lack a governance structure to achieve this. The latest bickering erupted after ...

Google today announced that its Google App Engine platform as a service (PaaS) cloud now has a runtime for the Ruby programming language. It’s available in beta, with the tooling available under an open-source Apache license. Now people who have stuck with Ruby over the years have the...

Over the weekend, I found myself watching “Tesla: Master of Lightning ,” a PBS production streaming on Netflix. From the story of Nikola Tesla , I saw parallels between his invention, alternating current (AC), and what bitcoin has been experiencing for some time now. On June 6, 1884, ...

(The Bridge ) – Tokyo-based BitFlyer , the company behind a Japanese bitcoin exchange, announced this week that it has secured about $27 million (3 billion yen) from Venture Labo Investment , SBI Investment , and others. Companies which have participated in this startup’s previous rou...

Now to the fourth- and fifth-ranked non-BTC blockchain assets, Dash, which spiked over $50 million in mid-2014 and MaidSafeCoin, which spiked above $50 million in early 2016. Dash : was created in January 2014 as an open source project built and maintained by the Dash team . Dash cla...

In December 2014, Microsoft added Bitcoin as a payment option , courtesy of Bitcoin processor BitPay, for a variety of its content. On Saturday, a simple message titled “Microsoft Store doesn’t accept Bitcoin ” was spotted on Microsoft’s website, and naturally some interpreted that as...

On the February 23, 2016, bitcoin saw the highest number of bitcoin transactions so far in a single day. According to a tracking graph on Blockchain.info, there were about 260,578 transactions in the day. The highest peak before this was in October, 2015, when about 241,346 transactio...

(By Ethan Lou, Reuters) – The Toronto Stock Exchange has hired a Bitcoin entrepreneur as its first chief digital officer as it explores the capabilities of blockchain, the technology behind the virtual currency, a senior executive at TSX parent TMX Group said on Thursday. Anthony Di I...

Bitcoin has been proclaimed dead 89 times. It has been labeled a Ponzi scheme and a failed experiment. Writers have argued for it to be forgotten and for developers to move on to greener pastures. But moving beyond this rhetoric, it’s not all that difficult to compare the rise of bitc...

Between last Thursday and Saturday, Bitcoin lost over 13% of its value to settle at below $365 for the first time since early December last year. That’s a long fall from the net gain of 35% last year that made it the “best performing currency of 2015 .” This is despite the fact that g...

In the Information Age, where people are tethered to their smartphones, just waiting to pounce on Donald Trump for announcing something ridiculous, nothing trends faster than insensitive, politically-incorrect statements — this is especially true for ads. It’s always been important fo...

(Reuters, Jemima Kelly) – Bitcoin slid by 10 percent on Friday after one of its lead developers, Mike Hearn, said in a blogpost that he was ending his involvement with the cryptocurrency and selling all of his remaining holdings because it had “failed”. Hearn, one of five senior devel...

There is no question that Bitcoin is causing a lot of worry and hand-wringing in the banking sector — and in national governments uncertain of how to regulate it. It is, after all, a highly disruptive technology — one of very few alternatives the world has seen in centuries to creatin...

Cialfo is a Singapore-based edutech startup kicked off in 2012 by two young entrepreneurs who met while studying at the Nanyang Technological University. A college entrepreneurship project brought them together in their fourth year, and they spent most of that year looking into an ide...

If you are thinking of going global, you may be interested in what Singapore has to offer. Having been consistently ranked by The World Bank as the world’s easiest place to do business, Singapore has embarked on an ambitious vision to build itself into a Smart Nation. It wants to brin...

IBM and the National University of Singapore on Thursday announced the launch of TechSG , a new “digital platform for Singapore’s technology entrepreneurial ecosystem.” In other words, it’s a place to get an overview of local startups, events, founders, research, investors, incubators...

(By Yuki Sato, The Bridge ) – Japanese app developer duo Ffab0 (pronounced “fab zero”) recently launched the English edition of a mobile learning app focused on Ruby and Ruby on Rails, called Pocket Programming . Prior to this, the team released the Japanese version of the app in late...

Bitcoin Foundation chief scientist Gavin Andresen and Bitcoin core developer Mike Hearn have created a Bitcoin fork called XT . Miners on the XT network can process Bitcoin blocks in larger 8 MB chunks. Blocks don’t need to be full to be processed, but this gives miners the option in ...